I'm going to make a lot of words here, and believe me I know how intolerable that is on a message board, generally speaking. If you've gotten this far, I thank you, and you can bail out now knowing you made a token effort. Thanks in advance for the particularly masochistic among us who actually read the whole thing.


Anyway, just an idea. I know there are tons of things the devs are already busy with for TotA and elsewhere, and nothing is as easy as it seems. I'm also sure this idea has occurred to a plenty of people before as being a logical sci fi concept, but it occurred to me last night in the context of speeding up large map travel, without going back to broken DL status.


I believe, for the most part, the engine speed nerf in DA was a great call, and has had a positive impact on gameplay and strategy in GalCiv2. The absurd ship speed in DL completely overwhelmed the AI, and as long as #attacks per round is directly equal to ship speed, there's simply no way to compensate for ships that are attacking 20+ times per round, can be everywhere without commitment, and still pack ungodly firepower, while the AI stands around blinking.


However, great as it is on the small scale, on the largest maps, it has had the affect of significantly slowing down the game, just from a pure logistical standpoint of covering the great distances. The slowdown on larger maps in a game Like Civ 4 isn't nearly as pronounced, even though the units aren't nearly as fast as GC2 units. The reason for this , is Civ sets up a framework for fast travel in the later game. By mid-game, you're building your railroads and airlift capability.


Right now in the game we have wormhole anomalies which, near as I can tell, are meant to be annoyances for players who leave their ships on auto-survey, as they watch their ships catapulted across the map and taken out of play for 20 turns while they crawl back to their range of influence, with no way to set the ships to ignore these anomaly types(I'm sure someone will correct me here and point out the "ignore wormhole" button I’ve always missed ).


What if, there were a few more of these, and a % of them remained "stable" after being explored, allowing express travel between the two points? Keeps some of the random "terminal" wormholes to strand ships, and make exploring them a risky proposition likely to take some time...and tweak the placement so there was always a worthwhile distance covered by the "stable" ones. A decent network of these would make large+ maps much more negotiable, and provide opportunities for strategic play, without further unbalancing the units themselves.


Now, on the one hand, it would seem like the basis for this is already in the game. On the other hand, I'm no programmer, but suspect that while great for the players, the real challenge would be to get the AI to use them deliberately. I have no idea what that entails. But there's strong genre precedent for the concept (Deep Space 9, Babylon 5, Stargate, etc.), and it opens up all kinds of possibilities, in addition to making big maps much more fun.


1) What if you were able to fortify and take control of the wormholes somehow, maybe by surrounding it with ships, and control it as a strategic "chokepoint", like the Panama Canal?

2) Perhaps with sufficient Starbase technology, you could build a starbase to control/regulate/fortify it, adding another much-needed reason to research starbase tech. Perhaps then Civs wanting to use it would have to pay a "toll", and hostile Civs across the map would have to fight for control of that point, or come the long way.

3) What if a naturally occurring stable wormhole was actually very rare on the map, but for a more deliberate application of the same concept, with sufficient Starbase research, you could actually build a "supergate" starbase linked to another across the map? You would still have to be able to make it to the point where you want to build the supergate in the first place, and then protect that position in a war. It would provide interesting opportunities to build "survey-constructors" that could slowly build a supergate if on the other side of an anomaly they were sucked through. And it would provide strategic targets during wars, as you desperately try to destroy a gate to staunch the flow of enemy ships into the heart of your space.